Raymond Carver

A propos de l'auteur : Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938 and grew up in Yakima, Washington State. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing lad to tome second to earning a living for his young family, although he did manage to attend John Gardner's creative writing course at Chico State College. During this period he worked as a hospital porter, a textbook editor, a dictionary salesman, a petrol station attendant and a delivery man. These experiences and his own increasingly desperate domestic circumstances were frequently the subject of his poetry and fiction. Although he published a number of small-press books of poetry and one chapbook of fiction in the i 96os and early 1970s, it was not until the appearance of the story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. The following year his luck began to change: he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage, and in the same year met the poet Tess Gallagher with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. He began to write again and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 19-79 and the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award in 1983. During this prolific period he wrote four collections of stories (What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, Cathedral, Fires and Elephant) and three collections of poetry Where Water Comes Together with Other Water and Ultramarine, which are published in Britain as In a Marine Light, and A New Path to the Waterfall, which was published posthumously. Also published posthumously were his Uncollected Writings, No Heroics, Please (edited by William Stull). In the last year of his life he chose and revised for the press his Selected Stories, Where l'm Calling from, and was honoured by induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in August 1988. This book contains the nine stories and one poem on which Robert Altman has based his film Short Cuts.